8A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2015
Divide: ‘There’s such a culture clash,
I don’t think it can be explained’
Continued from Page 1A
Oct. 1 shooting at Umpqua
Community College in Rose-
burg . Nine people dead, plus
the gunman. Nine wounded.
One issue, two sides
From urban areas, primarily,
come the demands for greater
gun control. From rural areas,
primarily, comes the answer:
Leave us alone.
How to cross that divide?
“There’s such a culture
clash, I don’t think it can be ex-
plained,” said Goit, who opened
Eastern Oregon Tactical in
Hermiston four years ago. “The
opposite culture bafÀ es me.”
Wes Hare says it’s a really
tough question.
Hare is city manager of Alba-
ny, in the Willamette Valley. He
started in Ashland, went to high
school in Bend, and lived in Eu-
gene, Oakridge and La Grande
before Albany. He’s spent plenty
of time in Portland and Salem.
He guesses the urban-rural divide
in Oregon isn’t much different
than a lot of other states.
“I think typically the notion
is, and I’m sure it’s true, in pre-
dominantly rural places people
are more concerned about gun
rights, more interested in them
and more concerned about intru-
sion” on those rights, Hare said.
Part of that attitude comes
from heritage. Many rural West-
erners grew up handling guns at
relatively young ages. Tap a cur-
rent or former country boy of a
certain age and he’ll tell you of
the single-shot . riÀ e leaning
against the wall in the closet.
Squirrels beware.
“When I was a kid,” Hare
said, “you could go out in the
country and shoot a gun, and it
wouldn’t cause much of a stir —
in part because there weren’t as
many people around.
“If you live on a ranch, who
cares if you shoot a gun?” Hare
said. “You won’t hit anything.”
Hare had a .22 for plinking
and a Winchester .308 for hunt-
ing deer. Gun ownership was
part of the culture.
“That doesn’t mean there
weren’t problems with guns,” he
said. An eighth -grade classmate
was accidentally shot and killed
ONLINE
Pew Research Center report: http://pewrsr.ch/1kzTTku
by his father while hunting. A
kid living nearby was shot by his
brother but survived. A friend’s
father committed suicide with
a gun. An elderly neighbor shot
his wife, then killed himself.
“Guns were very much part
of the culture, but so were gun
deaths,” Hare said.
Senior Trooper Kreg Coggins,
who works from the Oregon State
Police outpost in Enterprise, in
Oregon’s northeast corner, said he
interacts with armed, legal hunters
12 months of the year.
“I’m somewhat de sensitized
to people who have guns,” he
said. “It’s kind of odd for them
not to have guns.”
Means of protection
In the rural West, help from
sheriff’s deputies or state troop-
ers may be spread thin and miles
distant.
Some residents, it’s fair to say,
own guns and keep them handy
out of a belief that they may need
to protect themselves, their fam-
ilies and their livestock, equip-
ment, crops or other valuables.
Two-legged
troublemak-
ers are a worry, but many rural
Westerners also share the land-
scape with coyotes, cougars,
wolves or bears.
Eastern Idaho rancher Brian
Mays, who leases a 300-acre
private pasture southeast of
Henry’s Lake, estimates griz-
zlies have killed 14 of his cows
in the past four years — four this
season. He recently rounded up
some heavily armed compatri-
ots to help him scour the brush
for cattle, or bears.
“They’re not the warm fuzzy
creatures everybody seems to
think they are,” Mays said. “If
urban people could see how
vicious they are with their prey
when they kill them, it might
wake them up.”
Urban reality
It’s different in cities.
Some urban areas put up
with the occasional cougar scare
or coyotes carrying off cats, but
most city wildlife encounters in-
volve raccoons or possums, not
wolves or grizzlies.
Gang shootouts are a danger
in some city neighborhoods.
The presence of unruly street
kids and unkempt homeless
people, some of them clearly
mentally ill, may add to urban
unease about weapons or an in-
terest in possessing them.
The Oregonian reported in
2013 that 1 in 16 Oregonians
held a concealed handgun li-
cense, or CHL. At one point in
the early 2000s in Gresham, a
Portland suburb, two members
of the City Council and its city
manager held CHLs.
Open carry is legal in Port-
land, but guns must be un-
loaded unless the carrier has
a concealed handgun license,
Portland Police Bureau spokes-
man Sgt. Pete Simpson said .
Portland police have re-
sponded to 911 calls involving
people who were openly car-
rying ¿ rearms, Simpson said.
Statistics on the number of
such calls are not readily avail-
able, but Simpson said of¿ cers
respond based on information
they receive. Open-carry advo-
cates such as Goit, the Hermis-
ton gun shop owner, might not
be received calmly in cities.
“It is problematic in an urban
environment,” Simpson said,
“as it’s not something people
are used to seeing and arguably
could put the carrier at risk from
another carrier who may per-
ceive a threat.”
Armed with statistics
A report released in August
by the Pew Research Center,
based in Washington, D.C., doc-
umented the urban-rural differ-
ences. Of people living in urban
areas, 60 percent believe it’s
more important to control gun
ownership and 38 percent be-
lieve gun rights should take pri-
ority. The results are reversed in
rural areas, with 63 percent say-
ing gun rights are more import-
ant. Suburban residents were
evenly divided on the question.
The question of whether to
ban the sale of military-style
assault weapons also illustrates
the divide. Sixty-two percent
of urban residents favor a ban,
while agreement drops to 56
percent of suburban residents
and 48 percent of rural residents,
according to the Pew report.
But a greater percentage of
rural and suburban residents
— 80 percent and 81 percent,
respectively, compared to 76
percent of urban residents — be-
lieve mentally ill people should
be banned from having guns.
Interestingly, the U.S. ¿ re-
arm homicide rate has been
steadily dropping since 1993,
according to the Pew study.
Homicides involving ¿ rearms
accounted for seven deaths per
100,000 people in 1993, but
dropped to 3.6 per 100,000 peo-
ple by 2010 . Suicides account
for 60 percent of ¿ rearm deaths
nationally, and about 75 percent
in Oregon, according to the
group Cease¿ re Oregon.
The group, based in Portland,
describes itself as opposing gun
violence and advocating for rea-
sonable gun control laws. Among
other things, Cease¿ re Oregon
hosts voluntary gun turn-in events
that, since 1994, have resulted in
more than 7,800 weapons being
turned in and destroyed.
Gun ownership by region *
Percent of all households with a gun in the home.
Northeast
27%
Midwest
West
35%
34%
South 38%
Percent in each group who say they have a gun,
pistol or rifle in their home:
Gender
Total
34%
Men
38
Women
31
Age
32
30-49
40
40
50-64
65 and over
Environment
Urban
25
Suburban
Common ground
Executive Director Penny
Okamoto said the urban-ru-
ral gun divide is not as deep as
groups such as the National Ri-
À e Association would have peo-
ple believe.
The vast majority of gun
owners support background
checks, safe storage of weap-
ons and suicide prevention pro-
grams, Okamoto said.
Cease¿ re Oregon also ad-
vocates a ban on high-capacity
magazines and a limit of one
gun purchase a month to prevent
traf¿ cking, she said.
“We have a lot of common
ground,” Okamoto said. “Peo-
ple are not opposed to respon-
sible gun ownership, and that’s
the vast majority of gun owners.
“There are a lot of things we
can do to reduce gun violence
and stay well within the Second
Amendment,” she said.
“I tell people gun violence is
26
18-29
36
51
Rural
Party
Republican
Democrat
49
22
37
Independent
Ideology
Conservative
41
36
Moderate
Liberal
23
* Based on a national survey of 3,243 adults with an overall sampling
margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
Source: Pew Research Center, American Trends Panel, April 29-
May 27, 2014
Capital Press graphic
like cancer,” she said. “There are
a lot of different kinds of cancer,
and a lot of different kinds of
gun violence.
What will the
Oregon economy
look like in 2016?
“You can’t cure all cancer
with one pill, and you can’t kill
gun violence with one law or
one education program.”
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November 5
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